Bruce Springsteen on the best guitarist he has worked with: “One of the most overqualified in the business”
The music of Bruce Springsteen was always about more than just a guy with a guitar singing a song. Even though his lyrics told intricate stories about people who were trying to figure their lives out or trying their best to figure out who they even were, to begin with, the power of The E Street Band gave him the perfect canvas to paint those visual pictures, usually squeezing the best out of every single member of the group. Springsteen was known to work everyone down to the bone to ensure they gave it their all, but he didn’t need to worry about a thing when he hired Nils Lofgren to join the group.
Let’s get one thing straight first: Springsteen is the E Street Band. Although there have been more than enough people in the band over the years to fill out an entire neighbourhood in New Jersey, Springsteen is the heart and soul of the outfit for a damn good reason, saying that his band members are the kind of musical family that he could have never gotten famous without.
Before he was even considered for Springsteen’s outfit, Lofgren was already moonlighting as a part of another secondary rock outfit: Crazy Horse. Much like Springsteen, Neil Young was the kind of person who relied as much on his backing band to get him to where he needed to go, either through the troubled story of Danny Whitten or Lofgren playing delicate piano chords on ‘After the Gold Rush’.
After Springsteen turned to darker corners of his personality for the solo outing Nebraska, Lofgren was there to give him a shot in the arm for 1984’s Born in the USA. While many people would have sworn off ‘The Boss’ when they saw him posturing in his star-spangled blue jeans, Lofgren kept everything interesting behind the scenes.
As much as every song works as a pop song, Lofgren’s contributions are more felt than heard half the time, usually relying on bringing that extra guitar part or running through scales that seem to be coming from a completely different side of the world.
Although Steven Van Zandt will probably always be Springsteen’s second-in-command from now on, the heartland rocker still said that Lofgren was one of the best that he had ever heard. When inducting his band into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he said, “Nils [is] one of the world’s great rock guitarists, who’s choir-boy voice has given me everything he’s had for the past thirty years.”
Even when Springsteen was inducted on his own, he couldn’t resist paying tribute to Lofgren’s ability, recalling, “[He’s] one of the most overqualified second guitarists in show business. He plays ten times better than me, and he still comes over to hear my solos when I play. I guess he’s checking to see if I’m getting any better”.
Despite Lofgren’s touch in the studio and on the record, the greatest way to experience his energy is to see Springsteen live. ‘The Boss’ may be the one in charge, but once the guitar break starts, Lofgren is one of the few that can probably leave every other guitar player that night speechless.
